Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings helped launch an online petition Monday to encourage people to support improving the city’s public schools.

Rawlings called the issue bigger than the controversies surrounding Dallas ISD Superintendent Mike Miles, though he renewed his support for him and pushed back at his critics. He said he hopes the petition leads more people to care about the state of Dallas schools.

“I can pass city budgets, go to a lot of tree plantings and ribbon cuttings and it’s all for naught if we continue to have this many kids not prepared for the workforce,” Rawlings said in an interview with The Dallas Morning News. “I’ll be a failure if we don’t make progress.”

The mayor’s comments and the website launch come only days after students walked out of Madison High School to protest Miles’ aggressive principal evaluation system and in the same week trustees could vote to terminate some principals.

Rawlings said he hopes at least 158,000 people sign the petition at ImproveDallasSchools.com — about the same number of students in Dallas ISD. He was the first person to sign it.

Dallas cannot be a great city without great public schools.

Our entire community is accountable for each and every child’s success.

Every public school must be led by a high quality principal and every classroom by a highly effective teacher.

Change is painful, but our children are counting on us to represent their best interest.

Respectful, civilized debate will make our children proud of us.

Frustrated by low voter turnout and little interest in Dallas’ schools, the mayor said he has long wanted to launch an effort to get more people to care about Dallas ISD. He said U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who visited Dallas in November, encouraged him to help build community support for improving schools.

Nonetheless, the timing of the petition cannot be ignored. And Monday’s announcement reflects the mayor’s personal desire to see the superintendent succeed. Rawlings helped make Miles the superintendent a year ago when he suggested his name to a Dallas ISD search firm.

Miles has had some successes in his first year but has also seen his ambitious overhaul plan collide with community skepticism, an increasingly wary school board and high turnover among his top lieutenants. Teachers have also complained about low morale under him.

In the past months, his opponents have dominated the discussion over Miles’ most contentious first-year goal: firing principals. They have taken over community events, packed board meetings and staged rallies.

Along the way, they picked up support from Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price and former Trammell Crow chief executive J. McDonald Williams. Price has said Miles needs to return to Colorado and recently urged 75 southern Dallas pastors to deny his outreach to them. Williams, along with two other members of the Dallas Achieves Commission, sent a three-page letter to Miles outlining their frustrations with him.

In recent days, Miles’ supporters have fought back. The Dallas Regional Chamber and the Dallas Citizens Council told trustees in a letter Friday that business leaders approve of Miles. The letter included the signatures of 86 prominent Dallas residents.

Rawlings recommitted to Miles, saying he is the right person for the job.

“I believe that Mike is going to succeed, but whether he does or not is secondary to whether we succeed in doing this,” he said. “It’s bigger than the mayor of Dallas, it’s bigger than [board president] Lew Blackburn, it’s bigger than Mike Miles. It’s about getting Dallas to care.”

Staff writer Tawnell D. Hobbs contributed to this report.

Follow Matthew Haag on Twitter at @matthewhaag.

Five tenets

An online petition at ImproveDallasSchools.com, which is funded and led by Dallas Kids First, an education political action committee, lists these five tenets:

Dallas cannot be a great city without great public schools.

Our entire community is accountable for each and every child’s success.

Every public school must be led by a high-quality principal and every classroom by a highly effective teacher.

Change is painful, but our children are counting on us to represent their best interest.